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Grand Challenges is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. Each initiative is an experiment in the use of challenges to focus innovation on making an impact. Individual challenges address some of the same problems, but from differing perspectives.

In pursuit of a new type of AIDS vaccine, Zhiwei Chen of the University of Hong Kong will work to use a variant of the primate CCR5 gene as an antigen and test its efficacy in inducing cross-neutralizing antibodies against this important HIV co-receptor.

Alexandre Alcais of French National Institute for Health and Medical Research will study whether there is a genetic basis for innate resistance to TB infection through genome-wide linkage analysis of TB-specific T-cell phenotypes.

Dirk Linke of the Max Planck Society in Germany seeks to identify and classify all the molecules that make up the cell wall of gram-negative bacteria, which causes a major portion of infectious diseases. By recognizing common elements among these molecules, a broad-range vaccine could be developed to protect against a number of these diseases.

Allan Saul of the Novartis Vaccines Institute for Global Health in Italy will genetically modify gram-negative bacteria to generate large quantities of their outer membranes, which can be loaded with antigens that stimulate immune responses. This technology could prove to be a reliable and economic platform for generation of new vaccines.

Professor Hiroyuki Matsuoka of Jichi Medical University in Japan will attempt to design a mosquito that can produce and secrete a malaria vaccine protein into a host's skin. The hope is that such mosquitoes could deliver protective vaccines against other infectious diseases as well.

Hiroshi KiyonoInstitute of Medical Science, The University of TokyoTokyo, Japan

Grand Challenges Explorations

Infectious Diseases

1 Oct 2008

Hiroshi Kiyono of the University of Tokyo will work to advance a rice-based oral vaccine that can induce both mucosal and systemic immunity. If successful, the MucoRice system can be self-administered and will not require syringes or refrigeration.

Elijah Songok at the Kenya Medical Research Institute hopes to better understand preliminary findings from studies of sex workers that natural resistance to HIV may be linked to genetic markers for type 2 diabetes.

Humberto Lanz-Mendoza of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica will test whether mosquitoes can become resistant to dengue and malaria by the introduction of non-virulent pathogens, which might stimulate immune priming and protect against subsequent infections.

Teun Bousema of Radboud University in the Netherlands proposed that geographic "hotspots" of malaria disease drive local transmission, and therefore that interventions would most efficiently be deployed if they targeted these hotspots. This project's Phase I research demonstrated that hotspots of malaria transmission are present at all levels of endemicity and can be sensitively detected by serological markers of malaria exposure. In Phase II, Bousema and colleagues will define hotspots of malaria transmission in Africa in a site of moderate endemicity in Mali and in the low endemicity highlands in Kenya. Once hotspots are detected, they will be targeted with a combination of those interventions deemed most efficacious based on a mathematical simulation, the goal being to locally interrupt malaria transmission.